(This is a series of blog posts following along with Michael Massie’s Growing Your Dojo series of emails and how MasterVision can help with each of the steps. You can sign-up for Mike’s daily email list here.) Let’s talk about Step #3:

Step #3 – Retention. Keeping students around for the long haul. This basically amounts to two things – promise fulfillment, and customer service. This is another step many school owners skip, which leads to stalled growth and a poor community reputation.

Take attendance and use the automatic messages that go to the appointment book so that you know who is missing class.

For the students that are simply missing an occasional class (“Missed Class” in the appointment book), use the email and texting abilities to drop them a quick note to let them know you care and that you want them to stay on track.

Use the Message ability in MasterVision to create these repeating messages so you can send them quickly without typing them up every time.

For the students who haven’t shown up for class in two weeks (“Retention” entry in the appointment book), send them a different, more urgent message. Encourage them to come in and talk with you. Maybe have postcards you mail these students and use MasterVision to quickly create a mailing label.

Use the email ability in the Selector to stay in communication with your students. Things you can email the students: Exam reminders, special summer classes, holiday sales, special training opportunities.

Use the anniversary feature when taking attendance to know when a student’s yearly anniversary with your school comes up. Be sure to point this out in class.

Use the Mail Merge features with Microsoft Word to create quality exam certificates.

In short, use MasterVision to stay in communication with your students so that they know you care, use MasterVision to alert you to any problems so you can head them off before it becomes a lost student, and use MasterVision to provide value to your students.

(This is a series of blog posts following along with Michael Massie’s Growing Your Dojo series of emails and how MasterVision can help with each of the steps. You can sign-up for Mike’s daily email list here.) Let’s talk about Step #3:

Step #3 – Retention. Keeping students around for the long haul. This basically amounts to two things – promise fulfillment, and customer service. This is another step many school owners skip, which leads to stalled growth and a poor community reputation.

Last time we talked about measuring your Retention (or your Attrition rate, they’re the same idea). But what do you do if your retention rate isn’t so good? How can you find and fix the problem? MasterVision will help with that as well.

Go into Reports (the printer button on the toolbar), the Retention section, and you’ll find a variety of “Retention By” reports (by Age, by Months, by Rank), etc. Each of these reports will show you exactly where you are losing students.

For example, the retention by rank shows you the percent of all the starting students that drop out at each rank. You might find that there are certain ranks where you retain students and they keep going, but that there are other ranks where a larger than normal group of students is quitting. You’ll want to look at those ranks and figuring out why you’re losing students at that point.

Or maybe it’s age that is a problem – you do great with young kids, but are losing teenagers? Or maybe it’s time that is a problem – students are happy for about 9 months, but then start dropping out?

Whatever it is, MasterVision will help you identify the problem spot. It’ll be up to you to then fix it.

(This is a series of blog posts following along with Michael Massie’s Growing Your Dojo series of emails and how MasterVision can help with each of the steps. You can sign-up for Mike’s daily email list here.) Let’s talk about Step #3:

Step #3 – Retention. Keeping students around for the long haul. This basically amounts to two things – promise fulfillment, and customer service. This is another step many school owners skip, which leads to stalled growth and a poor community reputation.

First, I think Michael left out an important first step – Measure your retention. If you’re not measuring your retention, you don’t know if any of the other things is working or not. Calculating your retention manually is very complicated. Calculating it with MasterVision is just a couple clicks. Here’s how:

Go to Reports (printer button on the toolbar), go to the Retention section, and run the “Attrition Rate Over Time” report (Attrition is just the opposite of Retention – Retention is what % of students are you keeping while Attrition is what % of students you are losing).

This report is explained in more detail here. Run this report at the end of every month to see how your retention is doing and to know if the steps you are taking are improving it or not.

(This is a series of blog posts following along with Michael Massie’s Growing Your Dojo series of emails and how MasterVision can help with each of the steps. You can sign-up for Mike’s daily email list here.) Let’s talk about Step #2:

Step #2 – Sales. Learning how to turn those leads into students, consistently. Often a skipped step, which leads to school owners wasting a lot of marketing dollars.

While MasterVision can’t make the sale for you, it can certainly help you be more successful at it. This previous post showed you how to use MasterVision to track your introductory lessons. That’s the important first step for you – actually track what is happening to your prospects – are they being called? is an intro appointment being scheduled? did the prospect show up? was a second intro appointment scheduled?

Once you’re doing that, MasterVision can measure your progress, and, as the old adage goes “what gets measured, gets done”. You can then use these MasterVision reports to see how you are doing. Run the Activity, Infocall History: By Inquiry Date report to see the prospects you got over a date range, whether they were called, had intro appointments, or eventually enrolled. Use this to make sure you’re following up with your prospects.

To help improve your sales, communication with the prospect is key. MasterVision quickly and easily lets you communicate with a prospect by email, text, or by creating mailing labels. Consider doing any of the following to let the prospect know you are excited to have them join your school:

Send a email/text/postcard thanking them for showing interest in your school

Send an email with a “Welcome to our School” PDF that highlights your school

(This is a series of blog posts following along with Michael Massie’s Growing Your Dojo series of emails and how MasterVision can help with each of the steps. You can sign-up for Mike’s daily email list here.) We’re talking about Michael’s Step #1:

Step #1 – Lead generation. Minimum 30 leads a month, generated from multiple sources, so if one source dries up (think “internet marketing changes every five minutes” here) you still have a dozen other lead sources bringing you new prospective students.

We talked specifically about Sources and Introductory Lessons in MasterVision help you deal with the prospects you gained from your lead generation. Below is a simple list of other things MasterVision can do that help with this as well. If you don’t know what these things are or how to use them, get in touch with me!

MasterVision categorizes your leads as Prospects (Status code = “P”) and Open Prospects (Status Code = “O”). A Prospect is a lead that you’re actively trying to turn into a student. An Open Prospect is one that you have maybe given up on. MasterVision will automatically change a “P” lead to an “O” after 6 months. You can change that time in the Tools > Options.

The Infocall History report will show you how many leads you entered into MasterVision, whether they had a callback, did they make an intro appointment, did they attend that appointment, and did they enroll. Use this report to make sure you’re following up with all the leads you paid to get.

The Source report will show you, for each of your sources, the cost to get a lead and the cost per enrollment. Use this report too see what marketing sources are working the best for you.

Use the Appointment Book to track what intros you have for a day and what callbacks you need to make.

From the Student form you can email or text a prospect. Use this to quickly and easily stay in touch with your leads: Remind them of their upcoming intro appointment, send them instructions on what to expect/wear for an intro, or an introductory brochure for your school.

The Message function let’s you create standard email or text messages to send to a lead. Don’t type it out every time!

The Selector will let you create mailing labels for Prospects and/or Open Prospects. Send postcards to your prospects about upcoming school events or special offers for enrolling.

(This is a series of blog posts following along with Mike Massie’s Growing Your Dojo series of emails and how MasterVision can help with each of the steps. You can sign-up for Mike’s daily email list here.)

Last time we looked at #1 – Sources and how MasterVision can track the performance of your various marketing. Today let’s talk about intro lessons (or maybe you call them intro appointments) and how it applies to Michael’s #1 – Lead Generation:

Step #1 – Lead generation. Minimum 30 leads a month, generated from multiple sources, so if one source dries up (think “internet marketing changes every five minutes” here) you still have a dozen other lead sources bringing you new prospective students.

Now that you have those leads, you want to turn them into students. You’ll probably do that with an intro lesson and MasterVision is going to help you schedule those, follow-up with them, and alert you to missed intros.

First off, you schedule an intro lesson on the Student screen in MasterVision on the Classes tab. It looks like this:

You click the “I” button to create a new intro appointment for this student. This gives you the intro screen:

You schedule the appointment on the left-side: The person this going to teach the intro, the person that scheduled the appointment, the time&date of the lesson, and then any notes with the intro (that’s darn handy, huh?). On the right-side, it shows you any other intro appointments you have scheduled, the age of the person coming in, and the time they are coming in. You can use that to group your intros together.

After the intro is done, you’ll want to record the result of the intro. You can go back to the prospect screen, click on the intro appointment, and see that same intro screen above. You go to the Result tab and record whether or not the intro showed up and the employee who taught it. If the lead was a no show, you can also schedule a phone call to try to get them in a second time.

All of this information ties together with the appointment book. The appointment book shows you all of the intros you have scheduled for a day as well as showing you any missed intro leads that you need to call back.

So there you have it. MasterVision helps you schedule your intro appointments, keeps track of those appointments, and helps you schedule follow-up for leads that attended or didn’t attend. Easy & straight forward.

If your school is going to be successful, you’ll need to be generating leads. Don’t let the leads fall through the cracks.

(This is a series of blog posts following along with Mike Massie’s Growing Your Dojo series of emails and how MasterVision can help with each of the steps. You can sign-up for Mike’s daily email list here.)

Last time we looked at #0 – Low Overhead and how MasterVision can help with that. Today let’s start on #1 – Lead Generation:

Step #1 – Lead generation. Minimum 30 leads a month, generated from multiple sources, so if one source dries up (think “internet marketing changes every five minutes” here) you still have a dozen other lead sources bringing you new prospective students.

First the bad news – MasterVision isn’t going to generate any leads for you. It’s not a marketing tool, so we wouldn’t expect that, but let’s get that out of the way.

What MasterVision will do is keep track of all those leads, help your turn them into students, and let you know how your marketing sources are performing.

Let’s start with tracking the leads. Every lead you get you’re going to enter into MasterVision as a prospect. You do this on the Student form and there’s a couple important things for you to set:

On the first tab, be sure to set the Status to “P” for Prospect.

On the Student tab, be sure to set your Inquiry Date and Inquiry Type.

Lastly, still on the Student tab, set your Source.

Let’s talk about Source for a second. It’s slightly confusing and takes a little though to set up, but if you do this you’ll know how each of your marketing sources is performing. That’s important, powerful information well worth the time and effort.

With the holiday season upon us, you may be contemplating some marketing for your school. Michael Massie’s latest book on Martial Arts Sales talks about ROI – Return On Investment (gray box, about half-way down on that page). Let’s look at how MasterVision can help you track the performance of the marketing you do.

MasterVision uses a “Source” to track your marketing. You can setup Sources by opening them at File > Open > System Setup > Sources from the MasterVision menu. It looks like this:

The Description is whatever you want to type in. Check the “Active” box to that you can select this source on the student form.

Category, Type and Offer are all options that you can setup yourself by right-clicking on them. They can be anything you want (whatever makes sense for how you do your marketing), but here are some ideas:

Category: Is the broad category for this type of marketing. Ideas might be:

Events (Birthday party, sleepovers, halloween party, etc.)

Direct Mail (Postcards, ValPaks, etc.)

Online (Website, AdWords)

Drive-by (For the drop-ins)

Referral (For student referrals )

Type: Can be used to better define your Category. So you might want Types like:

Birthday Party

Parent Nite Out

Halloween Party

Postcards

Websites

Offer: Is the various offers you make in your marketing. Some examples might be:

2 Weeks Free

Free Uniform

Parents Train Free

Once you’ve setup your Sources, when you create a new prospect you can then enter the source for how they heard about you on the student form:

Now that you’ve done the work to setup Sources and are entering Sources when you input a new prospect, you can run a report in MasterVision to show exactly how your marketing is doing and to see you Return On Investment (ROI). In Reports, select the Activity category and then the Source report. It looks like this:

This reports gives you a breakdown then of how each of your sources did for the time period you selected. You can see what sources generated the most prospects, how much each prospect cost, what percentage of those prospects you converted into students, and your conversion rate.

Armed with that information, you can make more informed decisions about your next round of marketing.